Teaching vocabulary and the roles of the teacher

The main message of this chapter is that vocabulary teaching has only a limited role to play in the learning of vocabulary (no more than one-quarter of one of the four strands of a course), and teachers need to be careful not to overplay this role at the expense of the time available for the deliberate learning and incidental learning of vocabulary. In this chapter, the role of teaching is very narrowly defined, and it is used to refer to the teacher deliberately teaching vocabulary. The conditions needed for vocabulary learning are carefully examined and two approaches to evaluating vocabulary teaching activities, involvement load and technique feature analysis, are described and applied. The chapter includes a range of practical activities for teaching words, including concordancing and computer-assisted vocabulary learning. These different activities are related to the various aspects of knowing a word.